Twenty Ten

Having read Tomaz Lasic’s blog post on ‘Grow a moodle‘  I decided to have a go myself with Year 12 students who are back in school preparing to start their Y13 Applied ICT course.  However, due to the fact that I didn’t think my kids would leap at the chance to teach teachers straight away  I decided to adopt a slightly different tactic.

The students are following the OCR Applied ICT course and will be doing the Publishing Unit, the Web Design unit and the compulsory Working to a Brief unit.  Due to a cut in teaching time this year I had decided to combine the Web design and Brief units. The students, were slightly aprehensive and also seem to have a ‘fear’ of web design.  This is due to the fact that their experience of web design so far has been a tad hit and miss and their knowledge of the mechanics behind webpages was lacking. (As ICT Coordinator, I hold my hands up and admit that this shouldn’t have been the case!).  

I therefore needed a way to get the students understanding of web design, xhtml and css up to a higher enough standard to enable them to confidently complete the course.  They also needed to learn how to use Openmind BE (matchwares fantastic project management software).  So I decided to set them a task that would meet all their needs.

The task I devised was quite simple:

‘You need to design a course(topic) in moodle for year 7 students to show them how to create a website using html.

You will need to do the following:

1. understand moodle (youtube has loads of tutorials)
2. understand html (there are loads of great websites)
3. Project manage this task
   1. mind map
   2. gantt chart
4. create course
5. test course
6. evaluate course

You are in the ideal position to create a course that will work as you experience lots of different types of lessons….

Have fun, enjoy yourself and don’t be afraid to experiment.‘

Once the task was introduced I gave them all teacher status in a moodle course. They were then all told that they had control of one topic box and were shown some of the basics in moodle – how to turn editing on, the resources and the activities menus.  (Handy tip – assign the topic boxes to students first before they overwrite each others and my topic box).  Once they get over the joy of typing silly comments in their own box and re-ordering their postion within the course, they then started to have a play.

Their next lesson, then needed them to start mind mapping what they actually were going to do.  This included research, planning, designing, creating etc.  They have now completed a mind map and are in the process of preparing their gantt chart.  They have been very enthusiastic about the whole process and I think they like the fact that they have been given ‘control’ of part of moodle.  At the end of lesson 2 I also mentioned that once they have got to grips with moodle they will then be used to teach other teachers how to use moodle.  I was quietly pleased with their positive response. 

Now I have to wait and see how creative they become with moodle and also whether this has also meant that their confidence for web design has increased and that they can be up and running when I give them the ‘brief’ in September.

I would like to say that I will update as this develops, but I am rather useless as setting time aside to write up posts so it maybe a tad hit and miss.

misterel Teaching & Learning ICT, KS5, moodle, students, teaching, training, VLE

Virtual Learning Environments are one of the big things kicking around schools at the moment.  About a year ago we as a school decided to opt for moodle.  There were a variety of reasons, the main one being that a good friend of mine was already running moodle so I therefore had a contact when it all went wrong.

Moodle, is free.  We host it internally and therefore have had to pay for a server to run it on.  We managed to get our LEA to pay for it, due to some funding initiative linked with diplomas. So far moodle has been reasonably easy to use. However our original set up has caused a few issues.  (At this point I would like to point out that I am extremely out of my comfort zone when discussing all things techy… I am a user of software, resources etc and let my technicians get it working).  Anyway, our technicians felt it was necessary for moodle to be run via a https set up rather than http for security reasons…linked to the active directory. This coupled with an RM network (although for fear of being Belshawed -lol, it might not have anything to do with the RM network), means that certain aspects of moodle don’t work, unless you use firefox.  The frustrating thing is I have no idea why. Some powerpoints won’t open, attachments linked to news forum posts won’t open. Some flash won’t play….

I am writing about moodle tonight, because tomorrow we are upgrading it, changing the server, removing the https and figures crossed getting a fully functioning VLE.  It is extremely important to me, that it is working without any glitches.  In the school at present, moodle is being used predominately by the ICT dept and also by the sixth form.  I need to roll it out to all departments over the next 12 months as part of my performance management.  As I have found to my cost, when rolling out something new in the world of ICT, staff need to be:

1. 100% sure there is a benefit
2. positive it will work
3. find it easy to use
4. make their life easier

Personally 1,3, and 4 are a dead cert. Quizzes, online assessments (self marking), surveys, lessons, forums, games, gradebooks, accesss from home etc etc make moodle a great asset.  If number 2 doesn’t happen over the next couple of days then I’m not sure what I am going to do….

I came across a moodle bookvia twitter(thanks iusher), posted on issuu, and have linked to it below. I am hoping that it will be an invaluable tool in the training of staff in the use of moodle.

misterel Resources, Teaching & Learning moodle, staff, teaching, training, VLE

Adrive popped into conversation today with my network manager.  He happened to mention that it had been updated and now no longer needed Java to get it working.  I then mentioned that I was about to back up my ‘My Docs’ off the school network ready to start afresh next year…  a cunning plan soon developed.  A week on Monday I will be running a ‘training’ session on how to use Adrive and back up their user areas.

The beauty of this is that staff will have a back up of their work which they can access from home.  Usually home access isn’t an issue as we have RM Easylink.  But for 2 reasons this is going to be problematic.  Firstly, Easylink has ‘issues’ with Vista and secondly our network will be down a lot over the summe due to high levels of maintanance and software upgrades,

50GB free storage, put to a good use in a school enviroment.  Step 2, educating the kids to use Adrive to back up their work.

misterel Resources, Teaching & Learning adrive, back up, online storage, training